Skipping over the next film in the Marriage in the Movies course because I can’t for the life of me find The Marrying Kind, we come to Adam’s Rib. This one stars Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn, another phenomenally successful and famous Hollywood duo. In this case, they actually were a couple in real life and remained so until Tracy’s death though the relationship was kept a secret.

It’s also the first of the marriage movies so far that is a romantic comedy, more specifically a screwball comedy. This was a genre that was popular in Hollywood in the 1930s and 1940s and is characterized by being based around a battle of the sexes in which the woman challenges the man’s usual dominance. Adam’s Rib is a textbook example of this. Tracy is Adam Bonner, an assistant district attorney and Hepburn is his wife Amanda Bonner who works as a private lawyer. When Adam is instructed to prosecute a case involving a woman who shoots, but fails to kill, her husband and his mistress, Amanda decides to defend her in court out of her conviction that a man would be found not guilty if the situation were reversed.

This means that unlike most screwball comedies, Adam’s Rib wears its feminism on its sleeve. Amanda isn’t just struggling to prove that she is the equal of any man, she is arguing the case on behalf of all women. The grandiosity of this leads to scenes that might not make much sense but are effective and hilarious. In one memorable instance, she calls for accomplished women to act as expert witnesses in the courtroom, who are all too willing to recite or actually demonstrate their abilities, leading to a scene in which a circus performer cheerfully lifts Adam up in the air to prove her strength. Adam is initially frustrated by his wife’s determination to take a dramatic stand with the case but becomes positively enraged as the antics become wilder and the case gets more and more attention from the press.

Director George Cukor, perhaps best known for My Fair Lady, does a fine job at pacing but really Tracy and Hepburn do all the heavy lifting here and Cukor just stands back and lets them do their thing. The duo have fantastic chemistry together, not just in the pitter-patter of their dialogue but also in their playfulness and how they look so physically at ease with each other. It’s easy to imagine that this is possible only because they hold such real affection. The scene in which they show their friends and family their home videos feels impressively natural, informal and contemporary. It is precisely because the audience has no trouble believing that these two have thoroughly in love with each other that we feel the pain when their disagreements over the case cause a rupture.

This being also a courtroom drama we naturally must have a verdict. How it goes is no great surprise given everything else that lead up to it, but I really liked how both sides of the argument have valid points. I found it especially clever, and yes, even funny, how this even wraps back to the couple’s fight outside of the courtroom. The writing team to be commended here is Ruth Gordon and Garson Kanin who are also married to each other.

All this makes Adam’s Rib easily my favorite of the marriage movies we’ve watched so far. Tracy and Hepburn are a joy to watch and the sense of how right they are together carries the whole film. It’s an incredibly fun movie that should resonate well even with modern audiences and that makes it worth watching whether or not you’re taking this course.